The present invention relates to translating from one language to another. More particularly, the present invention relates to providing translation between languages based, at least in part, on a user selecting a particular topic that the translation focuses on.
Translation between languages is well known. In the most basic sense, translation is performed manually by individuals that are fluent in both the source and target languages. Human translators have the ability to translate written or spoken text, with a very high degree of accuracy, almost instantaneously. Additionally, human translation is often more accurate because the translator is often very knowledgeable regarding the topic or subject matter that the communication is based on.
Even though human translations are often very accurate, they are also very expensive--requiring individuals having very specialized skills. Besides the basic expense, which can be prohibitive, many instances requiring translation require people having additional knowledge that further increases costs. For example, if two biotechnology scientists who spoke different languages needed to communicate, the translator would need to have, in addition to being fluent in both languages, knowledge in biotechnology so that many "terms of art" would be translated with their proper meaning.
An additional problem with human translation is the small availability of qualified individuals to perform such tasks. There have been many attempts to address the problems of labor-intensive human translation practices. Often, these attempts have involved the use of electronic devices to translate written text from one language to another.
For example, Masuzawa et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,393,460 discloses an electronic translator that uses a voice responsive circuit to input words in one language, processing circuitry that translates the words to a second language, and a voice synthesis circuit for "speaking" the translated words in the second language. The translation is based on the operation of three "analyzers" that analyze the characters of a word, the syntax and the frequency of words. One deficiency of the system described by Masuzawa is that it relies on a single set of rules and "difficult to understand" sentences for each language. This invariably leads to translation errors, especially when specialized topics are the subject of the translation.
Another translation system is described in Okamoto et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,805,732. Okamoto discloses a machine having an input section, a dictionary section that stores linguistical information, a processing section and an output section. The output section includes a display and the capability to permit the user to edit either the input text or the translated text. Okamoto, however, suffers from at least the same deficiency as Masuzawa, namely that translation is based on a single set of rules for a given language.
Fukumochi et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,299,124 describes a translation machine that is specifically directed toward syntactic sentence analysis. The input sentence is divided into words by a dictionary/morpheme analyzer. The translated word is matched up with grammatical information for each word to derive tense, person and quantity information (i.e., singular or plural). A syntactic analyzer forms a structure-analyzing tree based on the dictionary translation and grammatical rules for the sentence. If the tree fails, the sentence is broken apart into smaller pieces and reprocessed until a successful translation occurs. Fukumachi, however, also applies a single set of rules for each language.
Frantz et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,507,750 attempts to address some of the deficiencies described above. Frantz, noting that a word for word translation is insufficient for accurate translation, describes a system that analyzes the context within a given sentence to overcome various problems, such as dealing with homonyms, incurred by other translation devices. While Frantz does deal with simple problems, such as differentiating between to, too and two, Frantz still relies on a single set of rules per language.
For at least the above reasons, it is an object of the present invention to provide a translation system that translates between languages depending on the topic of the information being translated.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a translation system that relies on multiple rule bases for a given language to increase translation accuracy.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide a translation system that utilizes multiple dictionaries to translate between a first and a second language.